Giving Voice to the Arctic
by Alison Bowen, CLA Staff Writer
CLA Music Donor, Catherine Madsen, has her photo taken outside of the Davis Concert Hall before the start of the Circumpolar Music Series.
Catherine Madsen was only in Fairbanks for three years, but it left an impression on her for life.
When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Fairbanks in 1962 for her father’s job as an assistant professor in the English Department. Coming from Detroit, she loved the mountains, the landscapes, the way people “bonded with each other very strongly.”
“I’d never seen woods, I’d never seen mountains, you don’t do that in lower Michigan,” she said. “I’d never been anywhere that was dangerous to live.” Needing to know how to avoid frostbite, like when it was 20 below on Halloween their first year, was an adjustment.
Three years later, when they left, she wanted to go back immediately.
“I made my parents' lives a misery,” she jokes, always talking about wanting to move back to Alaska.
She kept trying to make her way back, and eventually, as an adult, she did, to visit but never to live. This time, she came back with meaning.
Even as an adult, she would look at the university’s webcam, finding, she recalls, “the very view that was etched on my soul.”
“I just was overcome with longing, and started going back,” she said. She would visit campus, enjoying the landscape again.
In 2020, finding herself with a bit more money than she was used to, she wanted to use it in a thoughtful way, one that could have a regular impact on others.
“Suddenly for